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August 04, 2012

Supramental change is a far-off, distant acquisition

The
complexity of the systems, and the order of magnitude of the
inter-relationships take the issues far beyond the faculties of mind, even at
their highest. When we add to this the complexity of opposing viewpoints, the
diversity of opinions and dogmas that abound, we have a formula for gridlock.

The
supramental transformation represents a radical change in consciousness, moving
us out of the sphere of the Ignorance as embodied in Matter, Life and Mind, and
into the sphere of the Knowledge, which has its source in the original
Existence-Consciousness-Delight of Existence. There must be a reversal of
viewpoint, a change of core perception that represents a 180 degree difference
from the normal mental view.

For
ages humans have awakened to the “sun rising in the east, and setting in the
west”. This perception was the basis of the philosophical viewpoint that placed
the earth at the center of the universe and had the sun rotating around it. At
a certain point in our mental development we recognised that in fact, the sun
is not rotating around the earth, but rather, it is the opposite that is truly
taking place.

We
can get a far glimpse of the kind of qualitative change that needs to occur in
consciousness with this understanding, in order to recognise that the
supramental consciousness, based in Oneness, Harmony and Unity must become the
foundation of our experience.

For
this to occur, it is not sufficient to have small, incremental modifications to
the mental viewpoint. This approach cannot possibly usher in the kind of total
reversal of consciousness required.

Sri
Aurobindo points out “But the supreme Grace will act only in the conditions of
the Light and the Truth; it will not act in conditions laid upon it by the
Falsehood and the Ignorance. For if it were to yield to the demands of the
Falsehood, it would defeat its own purpose.” Sri Aurobindo, The
Mother, Chapter One, pg. 1

Every
force that acts in the universe operates under its own principle of action. The
human mind, unable to see the larger principles at work, treats forces in many
cases as if they are simply random and incomprehensible. Western scientists,
following up on the alchemists of the past, began to search for physical
principles that operate in the world and devised laws of physics by which they
can predict physical forces at work. This was followed by biochemistry and
chemistry. Psychologists and sociologists began to look for principles that
guide the action of individuals and groups of individuals. Nowadays, it is
fairly well agreed that each force acts according to its unique principle of
action.

Sri
Aurobindo extends our understanding of this factor in the realm of spiritual
action as well. The supreme Supramental Force, the Divine Shakti, acts under
its own impulsion according to its own light as an evolutionary and
transformative force. Thus, it does not act when the vessel that wants to
receive it is either unready or impure, and thus, prone to misuse of the force
for purposes other than what is intended by it.

“If
behind your devotion and surrender you make a cover for your desires, egoistic
demands and vital insistences, if you put these things in place of the true
aspiration or mix them with it and try to impose them on the Divine Shakti,
then it is idle to invoke the divine Grace to transform you.”

“If
you open yourself on one side or in one part to the Truth and on another side
are constantly opening the gates to hostile forces, it is vain to expect taht
the divine Grace will abide with you. You must keep the temple clean if you
wish to instal there the living Presence.”

So
long as there is a consciousness of the individual ego, the effort required is
to tune oneself to the action and influence of the Divine Force to the
exclusion of other forces, and thereby create a field in which that force can
act without impediment to transform body, life and mind. Sri Aurobindo, The
Mother, Chapter One, pp. 3-4

Dear
Mike, I feel the transformed consciousness to which Mother refers is the same
or similar to what Sri Aurobindo describes in “The Synthesis of Yoga,” in the
third paragraph of its unfinished 13th chapter “The Supermind and the Yoga of
Works”: “One must first acquire an inner Yogic consciousness and replace it by
our ordinary view of things; one must revolutionise the whole present build of
our being. Next, we have to go still deeper, discover our veiled psychic entity
and in its light and under its government psychicise our inner and outer parts,
turn mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature and all our mental, vital, physical
action and states and movements into a conscious instrumentation of the soul.”
Acquiring the Yogic consciousness would precede the psychicization (notice how
he seems to distinguish the two stages or realizations) and probably is needed
for the psychic transformation to proceed. The context in the chapter is that
he is warning us that “the supramental change” is a far-off, distant
acquisition, and that attaining a Yogic consciousness and then proceeding
through the psychic and spiritual transformations (he goes on to describe the
spiritual transformation later in the passage) is prerequisite to any
supramental change or transformation. It does seem that this inner Yogic
consciousness, this revolution of the being, while not the same as any stage of
the triple transformation, is the realization most necessary.

This
material that Sandeep has written and put together on the psychic being is
first-rate! Rick Lipschutz

“This
positive ontology of the human-technological system opens a new creative
engagement to the critique of techno-capitalism in our times, an embodied
experimentation which needs to be brought into the discursive frame of the IY.
Such an engagement awaits a new languaging and a new praxis.”

Whatever
language or praxis form this will take I venture say that it will not be one
stumbled upon by an great intuition. By this I mean that what we take to be
intuition is mostly an extrapolation of our previous experience, or an
unconscious projection of our conditioned past into the future. (thats why it
is so laughable that followers of the great yogi tend to dismiss reason in
favor of worshiping at the alter of the Intuitive Mind or to quickly trade out
of what they take to be the “old ways of thinking” for what they conceive of as
the “new consciousness” )

The
evolution of human prostheticity (technogenesis) is certainly not the coming of
the Other that modernist writers such as Aurobindo, Bergson, James and others
would have imagined a century ago.

So
if the Future is the unpredictable Other, whatever this new embodied
experimentation maybe by which we would best open ourselves to it’s coming, it
will IMO not be given to us by any mysterious intuition, rather what history
has so far demonstrated is that the new mode of this future being will
certainly be “Counter-Intuitive”.